Musical Mondays: Lerner after Lady

Anyone can flop

To be fair to Alan Jay Lerner, there’s really no direction after My Fair Lady other than down but very few have charted such an immaculately straight trajectory from Camelot (a success, just about) to Dance a Little Closer (renamed Close a Little Faster by Broadway wags). Some of these shows contain some of his most teeth-settingly contrived lyrics yet also some of the best musical-theatre songs nobody knows. (That would be a very good Spotify playlist, although obviously nobody would listen to it).

The Arthurian story is essentially irresistible, even though trying to adapt The Once and Future King as a musical is rather like putting a quart in a pint pot. I have some problems with Lerner’s awkwardly jarring faux-medieval touches and I’ve written previously about the two-dimensionality of Lancelot, but it’s not a bad musical by any means. I do wonder what the original four-hour version was like, the performance of which gave the director a Moss Hart-attack. (Lerner would have appreciated that god-awful pun). By all accounts Richard Burton, in terms of maintaining company spirits throughout the chaos, was everything Rex Harrison would never have been.

Regarding the score, ‘Camelot’ is understandably well-loved and ‘How to Handle a Woman’ is touching. (Still, it’s interesting that Lerner, the classic limousine liberal, couldn’t restrain his impulse towards sexist jokes. It is a funny line - “never be too disturbed if you don’t understand what a woman is thinking; they don’t do it very often” - but, unlike MFL, not entirely necessary for the song). I saw the show at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, one of my favourite venues, and it was… fine. It doesn’t quite reach the heights it set itself, but that is a high bar.

Lerner next worked with the brilliant Burton Lane for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, a show about reincarnation. Well, it was 1965; there was something in the air. I’m not a great fan of the score, although I am tremendously fond of ‘On the S.S. Bernard Cohn’, especially as belted by Barbara Harris:

“Time went tick-tocking on / Me, I kept yakking on / Him, he just listened and listened / He never looked once at a sight / And if his kindness was being polite / Somehow his eyes never left me alone / Aboard the S.S. [deep breath] BERNARD COHHHHHHHHHN!”

Coco (1969) is difficult to assess because it was written for Katharine Hepburn, who couldn’t sing but who could convince you otherwise due to sheer force of personality. The problem, however, was that Lerner seemed to be compensating by writing ‘literary’ lyrics for the great Kate as though she were Rex Harrison in drag but falling way, way below the standard of MFL. It is frankly shameful to saddle one of the century’s finest actresses with lines like “free to parade up / the Rue de la Paid Up.”

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, ALAN, WHY!?

It all has the effect of burying an otherwise interesting and, against the odds, tuneful score by Andre Previn. There are exceptions: the first part of ‘Gabrielle / Coco’, in which Coco Chanel reflects on her lonely life as the child Gabrielle, is poignant and affecting. It’s a dialogue in which Hepburn speaks to her absent father, pleading for his return, and he sings:

“Fare thee well, little drab, unhappy Gabrielle, farewell / Fare thee well, from that wild delicious child, Coco, farewell / Gabrielle, dream away a little, play a little, pray a little, make the hours fly / Til we tell Gabrielle goodbye.’

It’s haunting because it works on two levels. On one level it describes the ‘ugly duckling’ Gabrielle, facing her first communion, blossoming into Coco; the sort of tender song of reassurance that might be sung by a father to his daughter. On another, it’s the last time she ever sees the father whom she adored and who essentially abandoned her; his neglect inculcated the desire for ‘independence’ that drove her career. It’s a perfect few minutes of distilled biography.

Coco ran thanks to Hepburn, but Lerner’s next musical never even made it to Broadway. Lolita, My Love closed in Boston, which is a great shame as it sounds terrific (as far as one can tell from the live recording) and contains three wonderful songs. Its failure seems to have killed John Barry’s career as a composer for musical theatre although the score is stronger than several Broadway successes.¹ ‘How Far Is It To The Next Town’ has a driving, nightmare quality of relentless flight. ‘In The Broken-Promise Land of Fifteen’ is one of the great songs of young love, although I feel obliged to complain at Lerner’s lyric “one day when I was twelve and three” as nobody in real life would describe being fifteen in those words. That said, he more than compensates:

“And the tide that drifted in, circling me / Tried to sweep what might have been out to sea / But the memory of love lives on and on, forever evergreen.”

The best song, with which Dorothy Loudon apparently stopped the show, is the fantasy of Lolita’s mother, whose vision of the romantic ideal conjures the spirit of Paris into small-town New England. ‘Sur les quais (de Ramsdale, Vermont)’ is Lerner at his best, witty and intelligent and - hurray! - also plausible:

“Tonight my peonies seem like fleurs-de-lys / And across the yard, staring down at me / I see Notre Dame / sur les quais de Ramsdale, Vermont / And who would ever dream you could reach Paree / on the Interstate Highway 93 / Oh, but here I am / sur les quais de Ramsdale, Vermont.”

The stage version of Gigi (1973) didn’t run as long as the expectations based on the success of the film. Next for Lerner (1976) was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which went to prove that a show could still be a monumental flop despite being the work of two geniuses: Lerner and Leonard Bernstein. It closed after seven performances and the score hasn’t even survived beyond dribs and drabs; one of those, fortunately, is ‘Duet For One’ in which the same actress (on Broadway, Patricia Routledge - yes, that Patricia Routledge) switches between the parts of outgoing First Lady Julia Grant and incoming Lucy Hayes:

“They’ll worship her matchless cucumber skin / Her fingers like ancient bamboo / They’ll dote on her lips, so enchantingly thin / That it’s hard to believe there are two.”

Routledge actually inspired a round of applause mid-song, she was so good.

Carmelina (1979) did more than twice as well, running for seventeen performances. Dance A Little Closer (1983) closed on opening night, giving Lerner a total for his final three Broadway shows of twenty-five performances. Extraordinary. The former gave us the lastingly lovely ‘One More Walk Around The Garden,’ another song of nostalgia for a long-ago affaire de coeur:

“For one more time perhaps the dawn will wait / And one more prayer it’s not too late / To gather one more rose before I say goodbye and close the garden gate.”

For that, I think even Katharine Hepburn could forgive him.

1. Again, I acknowledge that my ear is not musically trained but I’m fairly confident about this.